CV / Vita

Wenche Westberg was appointed new state secretary in the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food on 14 October 2021. She is the government’s national convener for food systems. From 2012-2021, she was a political advisor for the Center Party in the Norwegian Parliament.

CV / Vita

Stefan Schmitz joined the Crop Trust as Executive Director in January 2020.
He previously worked as Deputy Director-General and Commissioner for the “One World – No Hunger” Initiative at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). He also chaired the Steering Committee of the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP). For more than 10 years, Stefan was leading the food security, agriculture and rural development work at BMZ. From 2007 until 2009 he worked as senior advisor to the Secretariat of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris. Before joining the BMZ in 2001, Stefan held various posts in the German federal administration in the fields of geographical information systems, regional planning and international cooperation on urban issues. He received scholarships of the McCloy Fellowship of the American Council on Germany and of the German Academic Exchange Service. After studying in Bonn and St. Andrews, he graduated from Bonn University in geography and mathematics and received a PhD in geosciences from the Free University of Berlin in 2000.

CV / Vita

Béla Bartha was born on December 5, 1961 in Basel (Switzerland). He is a biologist and completed his degree in archaeo-ethnobotany at the University of Basel. In 1995 he started at the Swiss foundation ProSpecieRara as a crop plant specialist and managed and developed the genebank and the variety conservation network and was responsible for fundraising and public relations. He has led the organization since 2002.
Until 2012, Béla Bartha was a board member of the Swiss Commission for the Conservation of Crop Plants (SKEK) and to this day he is the European NGO representative in the Steering Committee of the European Coordination for Plant Genetic Resources (ECPGR), which is based in Rome at Bioversity international. In addition to his leadership roles, he co-founded the first European network of national community seed banks (NGOs) of crops called “Let’s liberate diversity”.
Béla Bartha initiated and coordinated the first marketing project with the largest supermarket chain, Coop, in Switzerland and developed the first label to promote and label vegetables, rare breed products, seeds and seedlings on store shelves. Béla Bartha has led several tasks for ProSpecieRara in various Horizon 2020 projects such as DIVERSIFOOD, Farmers Pride, GenRes Bridge and ProGrace. One goal of these projects is to network Community Seed Banks (CSB) in Europe with national and international gene banks and to expand the on-farm conservation of plant genetic resources in Europe. Together with his organization, he is also committed to free access to PGR and against the patenting of properties that are specific to cultivated plants and livestock breeds.

CV / Vita

Ulrike Lohwasser did her PhD in botany. Since 2001 she has been working at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) Gatersleben in the Genebank department. As senior scientist she is responsible for the genebank management including taxonomical determination as well as for the compliance with quality standards. The research work involves screening on legumes and other crops to characterize genebank material for further breeding purposes.

CV / Vita

Henryk Flachowsky holds a doctorate in agricultural sciences. He has been a scientist at the Julius Kühn Institute (JKI) – Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants since 2001 and is heading the JKI’s Institute for Fruit Breeding Research since 2018. He was the coordinator of the German Fruit Genebank network from 2009 to 2014 and is a member of the ECPGR’s Malus/Pyrus and Prunus working groups. He is a member in several boards of scientific societies and represents Germany on the board of EUFRIN.

CV / Vita

Dr. Stefanie Griebel is a consultant for research coordination at Welthungerhilfe. Welthungerhilfe is one of the largest German private aid organizations in the humanitarian and development sector, politically and denominationally independent. Its vision is a world in which all people have the opportunity to exercise their right to a self-determined life with dignity and justice, free from hunger and poverty.

Dr. Stefanie Griebel began her career at the Georg-August-University Göttingen, where she studied agricultural sciences. Subsequently, she gained experience in the private plant breeding industry in Germany and Zambia. In 2019, she completed her doctorate in the field of plant breeding and genetics at Purdue University in the USA.